I've currently tested it with loading some pages and found that a typical page load requires between 200 and 800 SQL statements at PerlMonks and 1 CPU second of web server time. The thread-that-must-not-be-named takes about 1500 SQL statements (a few more if not done anonymously) and 8 CPU seconds.

On casual reflection, that seems grossly inefficient to me (not to take away from the original author(s) of this marvelous resource).